Electronic Trap for Automated Monitoring of Insect Populations

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an ecological approach to managing insect pests in agricultural crops, which involves analyzing comprehensive information on the life cycles of pests, their interaction with the environment, past and current conditions of the crop field, etc., in order to provide growers with pest management decisions that are optimal both economically and environmentally. Frequent and reliable monitoring of insect pest populations is one of the most fundamental components in IPM. Use of pheromone-baited insect traps for monitoring insect populations has been proven to be effective, but all the mundane, time-consuming work involved in manually inspecting these traps make insect population monitoring also one of the most dreaded and neglected tasks in IPM. To address this problem, Spensa proposes to develop a low-cost wireless sensor system capable of automatically counting target insects captured in the trap. The proposed technology has the potential to provide economically and environmentally sound IPM programs by automating the most difficult and labor-intensive operations of monitoring insect populations. The proposed technology will also provide unprecedented real-time, high-resolution insect population information to growers, which could fundamentally change the concept and the implementations of IPM. Phase I research will focus on (1) Develop robust detection algorithms for accurately counting the number of target insects captured by the Z-Trap; and (2) Investigate methods to reduce the power consumption of the Z-Trap. If successful, the proposed technology will eliminate the expensive manual work associated with trap inspections and provide a means for efficient IPM programs that are economically, environmentally and socially sound. Adopting the new technology will not pose any difficulty for growers since it will be integrated with the already widely used pheromone-baited traps. Furthermore, a large reduction of pesticide applications made possible by the proposed technology will benefit not only the commercial growers because of economic savings but also society as a whole because of its environmental impact. Other than the initial target application of insect monitoring for IPM decision support, the proposed technology has a number of other potential applications, including early detection of various insect species, mapping insect population distribution, mapping insecticide resistance frequency, and monitoring predators.